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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1050 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 22, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Trump is good at identifying problems. Terrible at implementing solutions. Rise of china was fueled by hollowing of the rust belt, Europe is not paying for it's defense, multinational companies do take disproportionate profits from US and so on, immigration and birthright citizenships are loopholes, the universities are too woke ... he just doesn't have the proper managing capacity to solve them right. And he is just using brute force and clumsily.

The man looks at a madagascaran girl in rags picking vanilla beans and sees the american people being taken advantage of. He ain‘t right in the head. Better than starmer who hands her the nearest military base, but still.

This chagos episode recontextualises the tariff deal with britain for me. I did not understand why britain would agree to such terrible terms, maybe it meant britain was weaker than I thought, but now I realize it‘s just starmer being happy to always give in at whatever terms the other side offers.

Even if one interprets trump‘s tariff policy goals maximally charitably (de-coupling from china, avoiding trade deficitis), none of them apply to britain, your most accomodating ally who you don‘t even have a trade deficit against.

It reminds me of that scene in The Long Goodbye where the mob boss breaks a coke bottle on his girlfriend‘s face, and while she screams in pain and desperation at being permanently disfigured, he threatens Marlowe: "Her, I love. You, I don‘t even like."

This chagos episode recontextualises the tariff deal with britain for me. I did not understand why britain would agree to such terrible terms, maybe it meant britain was weaker than I thought, but now I realize it‘s just starmer being happy to always give in at whatever terms the other side offers.

Hypothesis: Like America, Britain has a constant war between the isolationists and the anti-isolationists. Labour under Starmer are anti-isolationist and so enjoy collaborating with other countries as much as possible, mostly regardless of the actual cost-benefit to the UK.

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